


The King of the Forest

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: AND THEN THEY HUG THEIR DADS THE END, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Negotiation, background batcat, dick and babs work on navigating their relationship, trauma gets in the way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:21:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Dick and Barbara get back together, and it goes well, until it doesn't.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon & Jim Gordon, Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 73
Kudos: 300





	1. The Winding Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laquilasse (laquilasse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laquilasse/gifts).



> Whoo boy this has been my lovely pet project for a while. I'm far enough into the next part to be able to post this, so, Happy Thanksgiving, I'm updating Zoo next in 2028,

Dick had been the one who had suggested the vacation, but Barbara had been the one who had taken it a step further. 

Their new relationship was not like it had been, before they’d broken up; the first time they had dated, their relationship had felt at best like the first stumbling steps of a fawn into the world, knobbly-jointed legs shuddering with the effort of bearing weight it had never had to before. Their relationship had never lost those shaking joints, the  _ I don’t know if this will last, _ and naturally, it hadn’t. Dick may have done the grim job of putting an arrow through its eye, but they—and the two of them as a unit—had been a rotting beast for months before he’d finally put them out of their shared misery. Their new relationship had bypassed that feeling entirely; if they had been a fawn picking its way carefully through the tall grass before, they were the king of the forest now, with massive antlers curling behind them like a message.  _ We survive, _ those winding bones said.

Now the two of them fell into place easily. There was no anxious fumbling. They argued, sometimes, but that was a sacrifice they made to the lives they led—Barbara didn’t know anyone in their line of work that didn’t occasionally blow off a little steam by picking a fight, and it was commonplace especially among the quilt-work vigilante family they belonged to. Their arguments were born of stress and they’d apologized before they’d even gone to sleep that night. Five months, and not a single night where either of them went to bed angry—a vast improvement over the fawn stumbling through the bracken.

Dick had met her on the Clocktower sometime in April, sliding in through the window and whipping his head back and forth, shaking water from his hair like a dog did after a bath. “It’s a monsoon,” he moaned. “I’m soaked. You could probably wring me out and make a nice big ocean.” 

“Atlantic or Pacific,” she said. She didn’t look away from her computer screen—she was consoling into a router at the Pentagon, and as many jokes were made about her ability to hack anything, she did have to allocate at least some of her focus to her work. On the occasion. 

He toed out of his boots. “Bigger’n both,” he said. 

“Panthalassa,” she hummed. 

“Pantha-what-now?” Dick asked. He shuffled over—he was favoring his right knee, Barbara could tell just by the sound of his footsteps—and leaned against her chair. It creaked in protest. 

“Panthalassa,” she said, tapping enter with her pinky and watching the screen flood with IP addressing information, “was the ocean that surrounded the Pangean supercontinent, from the Paleozoic and transitioning to other seas as the land shifted in the Mesozoic. It was much larger than the Pacific.” 

Dick leaned his head down on her shoulder. Water droplets from his curling hair ran down her shirt, and she butted him with her chin, unwilling to sacrifice a busy hand to swat at him. “Go away, you.”

“I’m sorry, but your smartness has put me into a comatose state. I’m stuck here permanently.” 

She could feel his mouth turning into a grin against her shoulder. This time, she raised a hand and flicked his ear, and he jerked upright with a hand clapped to it. 

“You’re cruel,” he whined. He shook his head again, splattering her with water. 

She squeaked and her shoulders rucked up in defense. “You’re a wild animal,” she said. She scrolled to the bottom of the list and took a screenshot of the final IP addresses, and then exited the router. “I don’t know how they let you into civil society.” She swiveled her chair to look at him—the smile stealing across her face startled her with its intensity, but it shouldn’t have. Dick had an innate ability to make people smile.

Dick stuck his tongue out at her. “You elitist snob, I bet you only go to restaurants where your napkin is folded like a swan on the plate before you get there.” 

Barbara raised a brow. “I can’t believe the billionaire is lecturing me on being an elitist snob.”

Dick grimaced. He usually did, when she reminded him of the money he had. “Gah, you know what Bruce called me to talk about the other day? Investments. He hired a portfolio manager, apparently. He’s trying to get me to invest my trust fund.”

“Oh, how disgusting,” Barbara said. “How dare you do something at all with money you were given.”

Dick flicked his hand through the air. “He goes on and on, yadda yadda. Telling me the Titans needs a solid fallback fund because merchandising can only cover so much, and trust funds aren’t forever, and when you need state-of-the-art technology and medical care that only gets more and more expensive every year, I’m gonna blow through it like no one’s business.”

“How dare he be right.”

Dick grinned. “Right, exactly. I told him he should fuck off if he was going to call me and talk sense at nine in the morning. What’d you do today?”

Barbara rolled her neck, jabbed her thumb behind her at the massive monitor sitting behind her. “That. Updated data stores, mostly. Gathered some blackmail on a guy for Dinah.”

Dick’s eyebrows crawled to his hairline. “For Dinah,” he repeated. 

“Why do you look so surprised?”

Dick shrugged. “Maybe it’s that Dinah prefers the ‘I will punch you in the balls so hard that I will punt them into your internal organs’ approach, over… a Babs approach.”

“Blackmail’s in style,” Barbara said. She pumped the wheels of her chair and rolled past him, down the ramp that led from the monitor table and into the adjacent kitchen. “You better watch yourself, Grayson. I’m coming after that trust fund. I’ve got some pretty solid blackmail.”

Dick trotted after her, stopped to lean in the doorway of the kitchen. His smirk was more lascivious, now. “Oh, do you now.”

She flipped open the top of a box of muffins she’d picked up from the bakery that morning, and pitched one at his head—he caught it effortlessly. She tried to make sure he ate something at the Clocktower when he stopped by after patrol, because all too often he didn’t, and she knew he’d be dead tired when he got back to Bludhaven and wouldn’t. Even when he did eat, Dick ate like a bird, because most of the time he took a couple bites of whatever she handed him and then trashed it. He was always several pounds too light. “Only you would think blackmail is foreplay,” she said. 

“But it’s not  _ not _ foreplay, though, right.”

“Eat your muffin,” she said. 

He took a bite, and, true to form, dropped it on the counter. “So I might have done something stupid,” he said. 

“This is not news. You do something stupid at least four times a day.”

He shifted his weight, leaning his right leg out to the side and putting most of his weight into his shoulder, looking down at her through a fringe of thick black hair that was starting to dry off. He was still grinning broadly, dimpling his cheeks. “Okay, that’s definitely foreplay.”

One corner of Barbara’s mouth tilted upwards. “We’ll see where we are after you tell me about the stupid thing you did.”

He looked up at the ceiling, twitching his head so a lock of hair that had fallen into his eye would resettle somewhere else.  _ He’s actually nervous about this, _ she realized, suddenly. 

“What did you do,” she said lowly. 

“So I mentioned that Bruce and I talked about trust funds,” he said. “But I didn’t mention that we also talked about beach houses. Specifically the one that he owns, in Rockport.”

Barbara frowned. “You’re investing in real estate?”

“No, I was thinking about investing in a vacation,” Dick said. He looked her in the eye. “With you. Just a week, away at a nice beach, completely and totally alone. Emphasis on the alone part. I talked to my boss, he said it’s about damn time I took a vacation, and Bruce said he’d watch over Bludhaven personally—that is, if you could call in Dinah and ask her to do extra patrols in Gotham. I know it’s sudden, and you’d have to talk to your dad—”

She rolled over in front of him. “Get down here,” she said, thickly. “Get down here and give me a hug, you big idiot.”

His arms wrapped around her, squeezing tightly. “I’m taking this as a good sign,” he said into her hair. 

“Finish your muffin,” she said, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat. 

Dick had been the one to suggest the vacation, and they’d flown out to a gorgeous white-sand clear-water beach somewhere warm, where the sun shone all day and it thundered and stormed all afternoon. They didn’t even use the beach, really—most of their vacation was spent in their bedroom—but it made for a nice background aesthetic, another thing that added to the loveliness. She did get a glimpse of Dick in board shorts climbing out of the ocean after a cold morning swim, every glorious inch of him soaked, panting from exertion. When he’d stooped down to kiss her and mumble a  _ good morning _ into her mouth she tugged him down and held him there and kissed him until the taste of him was the only thing she could think about. She could taste sea salt in his kiss for days after. She woke up every morning with something heavy and tight in her chest that she couldn’t shake, and she fell asleep with that same weight—but it was a wonderful weight, a wonderful kind of happiness, the kind of thing she had once laid in a hospital bed and thought she’d never feel again. She had learned in those awful months as she sifted through the pieces of her life and taped them back together that happiness was a weight carried in the chest, and the lack of it—the emptiness—was the most singularly awful feeling she had ever known. 

Maybe that was why she had taken it a step further, on the last day of their vacation. 

His fingers had been running through her hair, sorting it into small, tight little braids—she was tucked in Dick’s lap, the two of them cuddling on the couch, dozing to the tune of a droning documentary. 

_ “Bitis nasicornis, _ or the rhinoceros viper, is known as one of the most dangerous snakes in Africa,” the TV said. “Vipers are known for venom with dual hemotoxic and neurotoxic properties, but in the rhinoceros viper, the hemotoxic properties are more prominent…” 

Something about the salty sea air whispering in through the open windows, the press of his bare skin against hers, the prickling of her scalp as his hands wove her hair—it drove her to say the idea she’d been turning over since Wednesday, when they’d made a ravioli dinner together and she’d flicked tomato sauce on his face and they ate out on the deck with some wine from the cellar. “I want you to move in with me,” she said. 

Dick’s fingers stilled. _ Shit, fuck, shit, _ she thought. 

“The Clocktower doesn’t have enough space,” he said, slowly. It was a lie. The Clocktower had plenty of space, now that Cass lived at the Manor. 

_ Put on a brave face. You’ve fucked it up and there’s no going back now. _ She swallowed. “I’ve been looking at other apartments. I need more separation, I need to not live where I work. I was thinking… maybe you could come live with me. Gotham and Bludhaven are practically in the same city, the commute isn’t awful and if you get tired of it you can switch gyms. Or, hell, you’re richer than God, you don’t even need to work at all. You can still patrol in Bludhaven. You’ll be closer to family, I know you hate that distance right now, and—”

Dick leaned close to Barbara’s ear and whispered, “Baby. I’m interested. You don’t have to keep selling it,” and she let out a breath that had snuck into her lungs. 

_ Interested  _ turned into _ I ought to call Bruce, he can help us look for a place, shut up I know he’s got particular tastes but he’s a lot meaner than both of us and no one will try to fuck with him, _ which turned out to be true. Barbara knew Bruce could be nasty when he wanted to be, had been on the receiving end of his ire often enough, but it was amusing in a sadistic way to watch him turn his devastating humor on hapless owners who just wanted to oversell their property.  _ For the small price of one point three million, _ Bruce had said to one owner sardonically,  _ you can own a glorified shoebox. How quaint. _ Dick had tapped her on the shoulder and said,  _ I told you so. _

Barbara tried not to pay too much attention to the amount of money being thrown around. There was a reason she hadn’t invited her dad, and that was because it would’ve done nothing but make him uncomfortable; that, and he still hadn’t forgiven Dick for breaking up with her the first time. She had explained that it was both of them, together, that had made their first try at a relationship a rocky, fumbling one—but he couldn’t see past the night she called him sobbing her eyes out and choking,  _ it’s over, it’s over, _ into the phone. Barbara couldn’t exactly blame him, because it had taken her a long time to see past that, too. So she tried not to pay too much attention to the amount of money being thrown around, because all she could think of was her dad’s meager cop salary, the every-other-month in high school where he’d pulled her aside and said, “Things’ll be a little tight, this month. You’ll make it, you’re my girl. But things’ll be a little tight.”

Eventually they settled on a high-rise in the center of the city. Bruce had been pushing for a townhouse in historic Gotham, even offering to renovate it for them to fit all of Barbara’s needs—and he said it like that, exactly like that, and Barbara had ground her teeth to keep herself from snapping something cruel—but Barbara and Dick both thought it was too far out of the way. Which had, in all honesty, probably been Bruce’s intent. Dick had told her Bruce had met the idea of the two of them moving in together with unbridled enthusiasm, and had even made a joke about grandkids, which had made Barbara choke. Moving in together, in Bruce’s eyes, seemed to be a bigger step than a marriage license, which was just another bullet on the list of ways in which Bruce Wayne was profoundly weird. 

Then, the renovations began—which was also something Bruce was involved in, and the degree of his involvement seemed to please Dick, so Barbara put up with it. Dick’s happiness was her business, her stock-in-trade, and if it made him happy to have Bruce around, Barbara would deal. And Bruce could even be good company, when the stars aligned and he was in a pleasant mood, or if there was some investigation to discuss—but otherwise he wasn’t a gifted conversationalist.

He came by the Clocktower two days after they—or Dick, rather—bought the apartment. 

“I wanted to let you know,” he said, sliding in through the window, dressed to the nines in a fully armored Batsuit, “the contractors. For the renovations.”

“Aren’t they scheduled for next month,” Barbara said, absently. She’d been testing a remote access program at the time, using it to enter a new bookie by the name of Sylvester Thomas into the Penguin’s records. Sylvester was Dick’s newest undercover identity, and Dick was itching for the opportunity to garner a reputation that wasn’t leeching off of Matches Malone’s rather impressive one. Barbara wasn’t exactly worried, because Dick was a born performer and if he could imagine an audience reacting to his every move, he’d be fine; mostly, she was concerned he was biting off more than he could chew, because establishing an undercover identity was a long process that took a good deal of time. 

“They are. But it will take you until next month to read the rap sheets.”

Barbara paused to glance at him. “So when you told us you knew a guy that would renovate for us, you meant you knew a felon who would do it for us.”

“It’s more than one felon,” Bruce said. “You have the right to know who’s being hired. They do excellent work, however. I had them renovate a safehouse for the Justice League in Montauk. It’s quite beautiful.”

“By ‘safehouse,’ you definitely mean, sometimes you guys go there and play spin the bottle, and—”

“Yes,” he’d snapped. “Very well. That’s all I had to discuss with you.”

He’d turned to leave, and then she’d said, “What’s with the heavy armor.”

He stilled. “Broken ribs.”

Barbara tapped a couple keys. “And does Alfred know.”

Bruce turned to glare at her from behind the white lenses. His glares had no effect on her, anymore, not since she’d opened the door and the Joker had grinned back. There was something about staring at that face, with that smile, that led a person to never experience true fear again, she’d found. She will never again feel the kind of fear she had felt then. “He does not, and it will stay that way.”

Barbara’s fingers flew over the keyboard. In seconds, she had sent the audio file of their conversation to Alfred. “Sure thing. You know I can keep a secret.”

He’d smirked, said, “On that, I trust you,” and then left through the window. She didn’t feel even a little bad when Dick mentioned Alfred and Bruce were fighting on his next phone call. 

Bruce had been right on one point, though; the renovations were beautiful. Barbara had little interest in the designs outside of them being functional, but Dick had done a lot of digging and printed out pictures of all sorts of interiors he’d found neat, and presented them to the head contractor. When he’d seen the inside of their apartment for the first time, he’d grabbed her by the hand and beamed down at her like the sun, and kissed her in a way that made her blood flow backwards.

And then Dinah had coughed awkwardly, since she’d come to help them move everything in. Because some of the stuff they owned was identity-sensitive, for security purposes they’d decided to utilize Dick’s massive network of family and friends, and Barbara’s much smaller one. It was both the best and worst idea they’d ever had; the best, because between Dick’s family, Clark, Dinah, Donna and Wally, they’d moved everything in and started unpacking quickly, even without the use of superspeed; the worst, because Damian refused to shut up, and Tim refused to not comment on everything Damian said, and for whatever ungodly reason Jason Todd had decided today was the day he wanted to reconnect and that had set Dick on edge, which meant the two of them were sniping back and forth.

It had taken thirteen pizzas to feed everyone, at the end of the day, and that was with Wally settling on eating a human portion. They sprawled on every available surface; Dick cross-legged on the floor beside Barbara’s chair and Wally cross-legged beside him, Donna stretched out in front of them both, Damian sitting on an arm of the couch beside Cass, who was laying across the entire couch, Dinah at the kitchen table, Bruce and Clark leaning against the kitchen counter, Tim sprawled on the living room floor, Jason standing quietly by the door. That feeling she’d felt at the beach, the tightness, that weight in her chest, nearly crushed her. Happiness was a weight in the chest. Happiness was a thing that was carried with a person, a thing you wore over yourself—and now she wore it proud.

Dick had taken a couple days off at the gym to settle in, and Bruce had told both of them that the Bats would survive without their presence for a night or two. He had emphasized  _ a night or two,  _ staring directly at Barbara—they were in the middle of serious information gathering, and Oracle couldn’t afford to take a backseat for long or they’d lose the small window of opportunity they had to take down Cale Harthy, a Gotham elite who was making millions off of sex trafficking on the side. The emphasis had rankled, because she’d thought Bruce had developed a respect for her work ethic, but one of Bruce’s worst personality traits was that he could develop respect and then rip it away at his leisure. 

Dick ended up taking a small vacation from Nightwing, and stayed out for the week. He kept the same nocturnal schedule as her—and with that came all sorts of minor adjustments, because Dick woke up frequently in the middle of the night to prowl about, and Dick also got up frequently in the middle of the night to snack, both of which were things that took her by surprise and grated on her nerves. She’d stayed with him before, but she hadn’t quite realized how frequent it was that Dick slept poorly, and it turned out to be almost every night. It didn’t seem to bother him; he just seemed to enjoy cobbling together the hours of sleep he needed in the form of various naps. He did the same with food—she’d always known him to eat like a bird, but she’d somehow imagined him to eat more regularly when he was at home, where she couldn’t see. However, he didn’t; just picked at everything he ate, and ate something small every hour. Their kitchen was quickly stocked with snacks. She adjusted.

On the second day, she'd had her dad over—he stopped by at the end of his shift with a cheesecake and flowers from Kroger. They'd gotten up at six that evening, when Barbara had gotten the message that her father would be stopping by soon, so Dick only had an hour to pace the length of the apartment and fret. 

"He hates me, Babs, he just hates me," Dick had kept saying. The  _ and he's right to _ was only strongly implied, but implied nonetheless. 

Barbara steepled her fingers in her lap. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it," she said, carefully, "he doesn't like you." 

Dick stopped and pressed his face into his hands, groaning. "Because I fucked up," he said. 

"We talked about this, babe. We weren't going anywhere, you didn't—"

"But in his eyes, Babs, I fucked up! I just—Jim means the world to you. This doesn't work if I don't have his respect, his blessing or whatever. It just doesn't."

Barbara had glared him down, one eyebrow raised. When Dick finally lifted his head to look at her, he winced. "I interrupted you, didn't I?"

"You know how much I hate that," she said. 

He threw his head back and stared at the ceiling, Adam's apple bobbing; she took a moment to enjoy the sinuous, long line of his neck anchored into the dense, lean muscle of his chest and shoulders. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm fucking this up." 

"You always think you're fucking something up." 

He snorted. "Because I am." 

"That's only true half the time," she said, grinning wickedly, and the barb had the desired effect of lancing his maudlin mood. 

Having her father over, for the most part, had gone well. There were a couple tense jabs—mostly, to Barbara's surprise, about Dick quitting his job as a cop, which was a hurt she hadn't anticipated. She should have, in hindsight; she could remember, clearly, the deep wrinkle at the ends of her dad's mouth when she'd told him Dick had quit. But it had gone well. Dick had taken the licks without complaint and if he'd disappeared into the gym for an hour or two after and come back slathered in sweat with bruises purpling his knuckles, that was alright. For her part, Barbara was elated to see her dad; he'd greeted her with a whiskery kiss on the cheek and a softly said  _ how are you, baby girl? _ and something in her chest had unfurled in the safety of it. She always somehow seemed to forget how much she missed her dad, when he wasn't around, because she could keep herself occupied, but every time she was in his arms it was like going home. It had gone well.

It had all gone well. It had all gone beautifully, wonderfully, amazingly well—it was almost like living in a dream. She woke up after sundown every day in Dick's arms and he kissed her forehead every day, and murmured,  _ how'd you sleep, baby _ and Barbara would murmur back  _ like a rock _ and his hand would skate lower and thumb the soft skin of her waist. They would brush their teeth together and Dick would sometimes insist on brushing her hair and wrapping it into braids. While he was on break from vigilante work, he spent the time she was at the Clocktower restlessly working out and catching up on the paperwork running the Titans required, sometimes heading out as Sylvester, but he was always home when she got there, and he always greeted her with a kiss that made her stomach flip. 

Maybe her favorite part was how often she got to look at him, to revel in the sight of him, now. It was no secret that Dick was beautiful; he had high, sharp cheekbones, an elegant jawline and gorgeously bowed lips. But there was also the fact that his presence, in and of itself, was kind—she felt safe around him. The feeling of safety had been scarce, after she'd been shot—after she'd been stripped down, after she'd been laid bare, violated. She treasured it. She treasured  _ him.  _

It had all gone well, almost like living in a dream, but the unfortunate thing about dreams was that they could never last forever. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in the end notes. 
> 
> I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

"So I offered to babysit Lian," Dick said.

They were both up early, both up at noon—Dick had slept restlessly, and woke them both up before leaving to do drills in the gym. Barbara had been unable to go back to sleep, so she eventually emerged from the bedroom yawning and went to find him, and all but dragged him into the kitchen to eat breakfast. He sat at the table then, rocking the chair on its back legs.

"Oh, joy," Barbara said dryly. She dropped a plate—scrambled eggs, with a side of chocolate oatmeal and banana—in front of him. "I'm letting you handle that. I'll make myself scarce." 

"This smells amazing, Babs," Dick said. He bent his head over the bowl of oatmeal and sniffed at it like a dog, grinning as he did so. "Notes of Hershey's, strong notes of Hershey's, I'm getting just a hint of—" 

"Shut up," she said, smiling. She balled up her cloth napkin and threw it at him, and it bounced off of Dick's nose and onto the floor. They'd bought kitschy cloth napkins for their dining table, embroidered with cows, because Dick had seen them in the store and said something about Batcow and had insisted. Dick had done most of the decorating, in fact—there was no cohesiveness to it, just the two of them rolling around a department store until Dick squealed in delight and dumped something in their cart. The placemats had chickens. Undoubtedly because, last she'd heard, Damian had adopted a flock of chickens. 

Dick leaned over sideways in his chair and plucked the napkin off the floor, pressing it against his thigh and folding it quickly, until the napkin was in the shape of a little pocket. He dropped it by her plate. "And that's how you fold a napkin," he said. 

Barbara stabbed a piece of egg with her fork. "There is no special way to fold a napkin, sweetheart." 

Dick shook his head. "No, no, no, there is. There absolutely is, because Alfred used to make me, and there's different ways of folding it for different occasions. Like, we're just us, and we're just eating breakfast, so a little pocket fold to keep the silverware off the table."   


Barbara raised her brow. "And why not keep the silverware off the table any other meal?"

"Because the tablecloth is always cleaned and ironed before dinner." 

"We didn't even have a tablecloth," Barbara said. 

Dick shook his head. "Animals," he said, and Barbara's hand tightened around her fork. 

"We're not  _ animals _ because we weren't rich enough to have time to clean and press a tablecloth every day," Barbara snapped. 

"I didn't mean it like that," Dick said. "I'm sorry, I just—it was a bad joke. You know I know what that's like." 

Barbara's lip curled viciously. "Do you? Because you were all of nine, in the circus, and I'm curious as to how much you actually remember." 

Dick's mouth flattened and his brows pinched together. "Okay, so you should probably take that back, I think. Because fuck you,  _ Barbara, _ I remember well enough what it was like to be in a starving circus with three outfits to my name, one of them being my performance costume. I fucking damn well remember eating cheap tinned beef every night and going to bed hungry because I'd been performing all day and sorry, goddamn Spam wasn’t enough to cover that. I fucking remember that, thanks for fucking asking." 

Barbara gritted her teeth and snarled, "Fine. Fine! You win, you always win. Eat your fucking breakfast."

"Not exactly hungry," Dick growled.

Barbara bit the inside of her lip until it bled. "You're never hungry," she said. 

Dick crossed his arms. "Lian'll be here at five," he said. 

Barbara reached over and tapped the table beside Dick's plate. "I'm sorry for snapping. I am. But you need to eat." 

Dick bristled. "Stop acting like I need your pity."

"Pity? It's called  _ worry, _ Dick," she said. "Don't tell me you don't know you've been off your game, because I've been watching you in the field and I  _ know _ you've been. We've been living together for a month, and I haven't seen you sit down and eat an entire meal yet. I know part of that is just you, but I think part of it is also stress, and we need to resolve that." 

"A brilliant psychoanalysis from someone who tried to tell me I don't remember my own life," Dick hissed, and then he jumped up from the table, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. 

Barbara sighed and dropped her head into her hands, massaging her temples. 

She stayed out of Dick's way for the rest of the day, because she couldn't help but feel slighted—he'd offered to babysit Lian without asking, he'd criticized her over the fold of a napkin, he'd rebuffed her genuine concern. Sometimes Dick got moody, and was a terror to be around, but he'd been fine that entire morning. Logically she knew she'd said something awful, but she wasn't ready to apologize to Dick when he was being a stubborn ass, not when she was still nursing her own anger, so she stayed out of his way by heading down to the Clocktower and didn’t return back to their apartment until Roy had picked up Lian. 

When she did return, Dick was pacing the living room floor, juggling a stress ball. 

“You’re supposed to squeeze those,” she said. “Not toss them.”

Dick stopped. The look he gave her was sharp, like broken glass. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, bewildered. Legitimately bewildered—eyes wide, brows crawling to his hairline.

Barbara pumped her arms and rolled forward, heading towards the kitchen. “So I can still sneak up on you,” she said. “I’m starved. Did you eat?”

“Yeah, uh, I had a sandwich,” he called.

Barbara swung open the fridge door. “Usually you’re a much better liar,” she said. “Come on, sit down. What sounds good to you?”

“Apologizing,” he said, from just behind her. Of course he’d snuck up on her—he always did, all of them always did. Cass was probably the worst of them all, about that sneaking. “Maybe hearing an apology.”

Barbara rubbed beneath her eyes, pushing her glasses upwards, and then she shut the fridge door and turned her chair around. Dick was leaning against the kitchen doorway, his elbow next to his ear, his hand hanging out in front of him, twitching every so often. Always restless, that man.

“You go first,” she said. 

A muscle twitched in Dick’s jaw. “I’m sorry you took offense to the fold of the stupid napkins, okay?”

“You’re sorry _ I _ took  _ offense?” _ Barbara said. “Jesus Christ, that’s not an apology, try again. Here, let me show you how it’s done; _ I’m _ sorry. I was an asshole, and I ignored some pretty major stuff that happened when you were young because it suited a narrative I constructed in my head to allow myself to be angry at you. You’ve been off lately. I was worried. I got angry.”

Dick studied the floor. “So it’s all my fault, then.”

Barbara crossed her arms, and when she spoke, she took care to enunciate her words clearly, because the anger rising in her chest would otherwise drive her mad if she didn’t slow down; “Now you’re being  _ deliberately _ obtuse.”

“Because I’ve been  _ off,” _ Dick said, “and I don’t know what the fuck that means, very good communication, there—because I’ve been off, it’s okay to take it out on me. It all goes back to being my fault, because everything fucking is.”

The last sentence was said with a bitter, wry twist to his mouth that made Barbara’s heart ache at the same time it sparked her ire. “Self-pity isn’t a great look on you,” she said. “I wasn’t saying it was your fault. I was saying it was unfair of me to let my emotions run wild and end up treating you badly because of it. I was literally saying the opposite, which you’d know if you would actually listen to me instead of hearing what you want to hear.”

Dick scuffed the tile with his foot. There was a long silence where she watched the tension leak out of him by inches. “Yeah,” he said, softly. “I guess—I guess I have been off. I’m sorry.”

“Make it up to me by eating something, for God’s sake.”

They ordered in Japanese from Dick’s favorite place, and she was given the delight of watching Dick demolish several rolls of sushi like he’d never seen food before, and then collapse on the floor moaning about how he’d never be able to move again. Tonight was Dick’s night off from patrol—there was a new rule in effect from Alfred himself that everyone was to have at least two nights off a week, thanks to the broken ribs Bruce had tried to get away with hiding, and it was a rule Barbara was steadfastly ignoring. Alfred had tried to put the same rule into effect no less than thirty times in the past five years, and it had always failed. This family was a family of criminal workaholics. 

Dick and Barbara finally puttered off to bed at four in the morning. In bed, she tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned she pressed her lips to his and then, astonishingly, there was a sharp pain in her bottom lip and Dick was scrambling away and her mouth was flooded with blood. 

“Oh my God, I am so sorry,” he said. “I don’t—I don’t know, holy fuck, Babs, I’m so—”

“Stop babbling,” she ordered. She held a finger to her lip. It came away significantly darker than her pale skin, in the low light. “Did I scare you?”

“I,” he said. “I… I don’t. I’ll, I’ll, uh, see you in the morning.”

Barbara reached out and grabbed him by the wrist. “Whoa, there, Hunk Wonder. You don’t need to leave. I should’ve given you more warning, that’s all.”

But Dick had pulled his hand away, and was across the room picking his shirt off of the floor, and leaving her alone in their goddamn California king size bed that was always too cold and too empty without him. 

The fights, even over the most minor things, continued, and Dick’s bad sleeping and eating habits persisted alongside the fights. She figured Dick was off because he was stressed, which was certainly possible. Dick didn’t get stressed the way any normal person did—rather, he was graceful and at ease and unbothered in the most pressuring circumstances and then later, during times where Bludhaven and Gotham were behaving and so was his family, he’d get wound tightly over the littlest, most banal things. He was almost the perfect inverse of a normal person, the total master of a delayed reaction. It was another of his idiosyncrasies she had learned to love not only as his friend but his partner, and in the field, his commander. But whatever it was, whatever rot was inside him, he would not let her in, would not lend that rot even a moment’s air to ease it.

It was starting to seem that their king of the forest was king of nothing much at all; that in the end,  _ we survive _ simply meant both of them spent more nights in tears than otherwise.

Barbara took to staying at the Clocktower more and more often, which was useful exactly once, when Selina Kyle dropped in. Literally dropped in—jumped down from the rafters and landed on the floor in a crouch, ruby red lips tilted in a smirk. Not for the first time, Barbara understood why Bruce had fallen so wildly in love with her; there wasn’t a move Catwoman made that wasn’t tantalizing, that didn’t purr  _ stop what you’re doing, and look at me.  _ People probably saw Selina Kyle walking down the street, and fell in love with her, and then never recovered from it.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Barbara said, conversationally, “so that means you turned off my perimeter alarms.”

Selina rose. She was in one of her old costumes, the purple bodysuit with the pointed cowl, and the thigh-high black boots. “Every single one.”

“You know I have to go back and turn those on manually, right.”

“Not exactly my concern,” she said. She stalked over to the desk Barbara had wheeled her chair away from when Catwoman had dropped from her rafters, leaned against it casually, as if she belonged there. 

“Feeling nostalgic?” Barbara asked. 

Selina picked at her claws. “The new claws are better. They’re diamond-tipped. These, though, took a chunk out of Batman’s chest, when I first met him. Good memories. I keep good memories around.”

“I take it you’re angry with him.”

One eyebrow arched perfectly, partially hidden beneath the cowl. “Whatever for,” she said, lowly. 

Barbara turned away, shaking her head. “The two of you are weird.”

“Not all of us want your domestic bliss.” Selina held out her hand, admiring the claws that caught the light. “I did miss these.”

“Domestic bliss isn’t so blissful, anyway,” Barbara said. “What do you want?”

“To the point. I like that. I’m here to tell you that I’ll be in Las Vegas for a while. And by I, I mean Batman, too.”

Barbara’s eyebrows crawled to her hairline. “Las Vegas.”

“I’m getting married,” Selina said, bluntly.

Barbara tapped her fingers on her desk. She kept her face studiously blank, which was more difficult for her than it had been when she was Batgirl, because now she hid behind a screen and only practiced her poker face when playing at verbal warfare with one of the eccentric people she worked with. “You might have to explain that one.”

Selina shifted so she was now sitting halfway on the desk, one leg raised. She waved her hand between them. “It stays between us girls.”

“I am sort of known for my secret-keeping skills.”

“Bruce is going to propose,” Selina said. 

Barbara blinked. “Say—say that again?”

“Keep up, darling, he’s going to propose,” Selina said. “So I’ve stolen the engagement ring. I’m going to hide it somewhere in Vegas, and he’s going to have twelve hours to find it. If he does, we’ll get married that night. If he doesn’t, I take the diamonds out of the ring and put them in Isis’s collar. Hers are looking a bit tired, could do with a refresher.”

Barbara folded her hands. “I don’t understand either of you as people.”

“Understanding’s overrated. I just wanted to let you know that Batman’s going to to be occupied, and if there’s an emergency and he stops looking for that ring, it’s mine.”

“How did you manage to steal an engagement ring from Batman?” Barbara asked.

“I’m Catwoman,” she said, and that was all the answer she gave. 

Barbara rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m not really over Bruce proposing. He’s not—exactly the type.”

Inwardly, she knew that Bruce was precisely the type, under the right circumstances—despite his less than traditional method of cleaning up Gotham, he had a bit of a traditionalist streak at heart. What really bothered her was that she hadn’t seen it coming, and usually she could guess every move Bruce made. She knew for a fact he hadn’t even consulted Dick when he ordinarily would have, because Dick would have told her immediately, and proceeded to not shut up about it for weeks. He was acting rashly, emotionally—and for once, it seemed like that might be a good thing.

“I make a beautiful exception to all of his rules,” Selina said. “How’s your own adventure into domestic bliss—painful? Excruciating? Simply the worst?”

“You could say that,” Barbara said, tightly.

“Tell me about it. Being tied down—it’s just not ideal. A girl’s got to have some fun,” Selina said.

Barbara stared at her. “Then why don’t you just… turn Bruce down?”

“Because he makes a beautiful exception to all of my rules,” Selina said. Her eyes, green with bright yellow flecks at the center, were deeply serious. “You should think about whether Dick is a beautiful exception to all of yours.”

“I,” she said, dumbly. It felt like the wind had been taken out of her. “I think he’s miserable. I don’t know why, and I think it might be because—”

_ I’m not good enough, _ she didn’t say. She hadn’t known that was what she was thinking, until that moment of brutal clarity. Her brain hissed the old, familiar thoughts;  _ you’ll never be good enough, you’ll never be good enough, he’s never going to want you, you’re a burden. _

Selina seemed to have heard the unspoken words anyway. She turned away, looking out across the cluttered room. “Let me tell you,” she said, “That I understand.”

Barbara snorted. 

The admonishing look Selina gave her could cut through glass without shattering it. “It isn’t that I came from the gutter, you know. I refuse to be ashamed for being born unlucky. What I do feel ashamed of—what I feel isn’t good enough—is that I let greed rule me for so long, and abandoned people I cared for in the process. That’s what keeps me up at night. You, however, darling, have never been anything but good. Nothing should keep you up at night. You’re just gorgeous through and through.”

“Since when do you call me  _ darling,” _ Barbara groused. 

“Refuse to be ashamed. Refuse to let anyone shame you. That is my advice to you. Now, I have a ring to hide.” Selina went to the window, propped it open, and looked back to say, “And I’m wearing this because this is what I was wearing when I met Bruce. It’s romance, not nostalgia, darling.”

Then she was slithering through the window and dropping away into the night sky, leaving Barbara staring at her desk, contemplating one of the most phenomenally weird conversations she’d ever had. She pulled out her phone and fired off a text to Dick—she hadn’t talked to him all day, not since the night before, when they’d had a screaming match over the laundry _ —don’t freak out, _ she typed,  _ but your dad’s getting married. _

_ WHAT, _ was the instant reply. 

_ Selina paid me a visit. She stole the engagement ring.  _

And then,  _ deffo freaking out, get home I need details _ popped up on her screen.

_ On my way, _ she said. _ Just don’t say anything to him, Selina’s surprising him. _

Dick demanded to hear the details once, and then twice, and then three times—Barbara managed to get by with leaving out Selina’s advice at the end of the conversation, and she tried not to look at Dick, because as well as she could lie to him most of the time she wasn’t quite feeling up to it then. Dick was elated, and he hit the gym to work off the excess energy from that excitement even though he’d just gotten back from patrol. It was a recently recurring thing, how hard Dick was pushing himself physically. He seemed to spend more nights in the gym than he did sleeping.

She stayed up to wait him out, because she wanted to talk to him, and when he finally wandered out at nine in the morning, soaked in sweat, he was still beaming. 

“You’re still up?” he asked, rolling on the balls of his feet, wiping his face with a towel. She had positioned her chair in the middle of the living room, so she’d be unmissable—he was so easily startled, nowadays. So high-strung. 

“I am,” she said, evenly.

He grinned. “I’m still thinking about it. Married. Bruce deserves this, you know? I’m just mad I don’t get to hear Clark’s best man speech—which, you know, I am a little pissed about, the whole not having a wedding thing. I want a big wedding with everyone there so I can embarrass him publicly.”

“You’re shaking,” she said. 

He shrugged. The grin faltered. “Overdid it a bit.”

“You keep doing that, you know. Overdoing it,” she said. She steepled her fingers in her lap. “Maybe we should talk about how things are going.”

The grin faltered and then slipped away. She missed it—he had a lovely smile. “I think they’re going fine,” he said, stiffly.

“Really,” she said. “We haven’t slept in the same bed in a week.”

“We’re adjusting,” he said.

Barbara raised her brows. “Adjusting,” she said. 

“You’re really not helping make this a good conversation when you look at me like I’m an idiot,” he snapped. “I know you’re Barbara goddamn Gordon, the smartest being in the universe, nigh fuckin’ omnipotent, and I’m just the pathetic worm you live with, but you could at least try a little respect.”

Barbara turned away from him, because the look on his face was ugly, and she didn’t want to see it occupy the face of the man she loved so dearly. She picked at her molars with her tongue, and then said, “Why do you think I think of you that way?”

Her voice was calm, quiet. The harshness of his posture, which she could see out of the corner of her eye, eased. “It just feels that way,” he said. 

“I think,” she said, turning to look at him again, “you think I think of you that way because that’s how you think of yourself.”

Dick jerked, turned away, Adam’s apple dipping up and down. “This conversation is over,” he growled. 

“I don’t want it to be over,” she said. 

Dick’s arm moved like a striking rattlesnake and he slammed the flat of his hand against his temple, his fingers twisting in his hair. “Shut up, okay? Just shut up. I appreciate—the concern—but there’s not a fucking problem, and there’s nothing fucking wrong with me.”

Barbara’s brows furrowed. “Dick. Baby. I never said there was.”

His open hand came down against his temple again. “This is over.”

She spoke before she thought it through, because her heart was hammering against her sternum, and her blood ran sizzling hot, and the words cut her tongue as she spoke them; “Fuck you, Dick Grayson. Here I am—here I am worried, concerned, crying over you, blaming myself, thinking I’m not good enough. Letting myself think I’m just—ugly to you, that it’s me, that you’re miserable because I’m not good enough. Fuck that. Fuck being good enough for you.”

She was crying, now, sobbing, actually—and then Dick was kneeling down in front of her and cupping her face. “God, Babs, you’re perfect, I’m sorry I didn’t—I’m so sorry,” he said. He thumbed away her tears. “You don’t have to be good enough for me, baby, it’s not about that. You’re already good. You’re already perfect.”

“Then why isn’t this working,” she whispered. “What’s wrong. What’s—what’s wrong, why isn’t this working.”

Dick’s hands dropped from her face and he got to his feet. “Sleep,” he said. “Let’s sleep. We can—we can talk in the morning.”

Dick slept restlessly, but Barbara didn’t sleep at all; she laid awake, flushed with equal embarrassment at her outburst, and pleasure at Dick’s tenderness with her.  _ He’s lying and he feels like he’s trapped with you, _ her brain said, the farthest and darkest reaches crawling forward. When she had been at her lowest after the Joker had shot her, when she had been stockpiling the antidepressants in the hospital in her pillow to knock them all back at once, it had felt like floating—complete detachment from anything and everything, unreachable, cast astray in a sea of gray. Everything had felt like she was seeing it from behind frosted glass, except for the whispers, the  _ useless fucking cripple, _ the ghostly feeling of the Joker’s hands peeling off her clothes. 

The frosted glass didn’t shatter until maybe day ten, when Bruce had said, “Killing yourself is not a sustainable plan.”

She’d always liked his bluntness, but she’d hated it then. “What,” she’d rasped. 

“The antidepressants. I know you aren’t taking them. You can lie to your father, but not to me. Your plan, currently, is to die, correct?” he’d said, matter-of-factly. “I would posit to you that there is great value in your continued living, but you won’t see that. You’re depressed, and a depressed person fundamentally does not see their own value.”

“I hate you,” she’d spat.

Bruce tilted his head. “Fair point. What I should say is—I made a choice, once. I almost let myself die. I chose to remake myself, instead. Become someone new. Become a new Barbara Gordon. Remake yourself.”

She had relaxed despite herself, but she wasn’t willing to let go of her vitriol quite yet. “How the fuck am I supposed to do that.”

“Try taking the antidepressants, for starters.”

She looked at him. He had a black eye, which indicated he was being sloppier than usual. “You didn’t. Why should I?”

“I don’t take antidepressants because I can’t,” he said. 

She’d snorted. “Hypocrite.”

“No. I have bipolar disorder. Antidepressants historically do not work well in patients with bipolar disorder,” he’d said, and then he’d reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m going to get rid of what you have stored. Tomorrow, you’re going to give it a chance.”

And she had. 

She thought of that, while she laid awake.  _ Tomorrow, you’re going to give it a chance. _ Tomorrow, she would give it a chance—she would believe, for now, that they would work things out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion of past suicidal impulses and current self-worth issues. 
> 
> I hope you guys enjoyed that!

**Author's Note:**

> AND THEN THEY HUGGED THEIR DADS AND IT WAS FINE.


End file.
